Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939a-1945

Edward Reicher (1900–1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Höfle and give an eyewitness account of Höfle’s role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps of Poland. Reicher’s memoir, Country of Ash, was rewritten from memory in Polish after being destroyed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and first published posthumously in France, in a French translation by his daughter Elisabeth Reicher-Bizouard and Jacques Greif.Translator Magda Bogin is acclaimed for her “suave” (Publishers Weekly) and “strikingly true” (School Library Journal) translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Isabel Allende’s international bestseller The House of Spirits, and letters by children deported to Auschwitz, which appear in the landmark publication French Children of the Holocaust. Bogin’s own novel, Natalya, God’s Messenger, received the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. She lives in New York.

A starkly compelling, original chronicle of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland, available in English for the first time

Translator?s Foreword by Magda BoginIntroduction by Elisabeth Bizouard-ReicherAuthor?s Preface by Edward ReicherPart I: Our Wandering BeginsPart II: In the Warsaw GhettoPart III: Becoming AryanPart IV: The Endless Road